Take Better Control Of BUEditor

BUEditor has always been my go to editor for Drupal installations. It makes writing markup easy for people not familiar with HTML and saves time for those who write it daily. With as powerful as BUEditor is, it has always missed something for those who want better control over their Drupal installation, so a few months ago I released a sandbox project on Drupal called BUEditor Plus. Today I just promoted this sandbox to full project status.

So what does BUEditor Plus do?

Well the default behavior of BUEditor is to place the editor on all text areas. You can limit this through paths and ids, but you are still given the same editor on all textareas. This is great for a lot of use cases, but what about different input formats? That's where the power of BUEditor Plus comes into play.

With BUEditor Plus you create profiles. These are similar to the default BUEditor settings screen where you set a default editor and alternative editor, but instead of working on a per-role basis, BUEditor Plus works on a per input format basis. Needless to say this also means that BUEditor Plus will only show on textareas that are set to do html/text processing. When you think about where you add markup, having this restriction makes perfect sense as you never want 100% unfiltered markup being inserted anyways (kittens will die!)

Once you have created your profiles for BUEditor the next step is to edit your entities' text fields you want BUEditor to show on. When you go to edit that field there will now be a drop down selection where you pick the BUEditor Plus profile you with to use on that field. Once you have done that you are set and can start writing your content.

Different Formats, Different Editors

The biggest beauty of BUEditor Plus is the ability to change editors on the fly. Editors are displayed based upon input format. That means you can have an editor for filtered HTML and a more robust one for full HTML. When you change the input format for your textarea BUEditor will also change to the appropriate editor automatically. This comes in really handy when offering different types of markup like HTML, BBCode and Smarty.

Why Not Make It Part of BUEditor?

Originally I thought this would be a great addition to the core BUEditor module, but I have since changed my mind. Actually given BUEditor's long history and high usage, making such a fundamental change in the way it operates could cause problems. Instead this module extends BUEditor and provides the new functionality without the need to patch the BUEditor module. This makes it a great companion to BUEditor and keeps intact the original way BUEditor operates.

I hope people find this module useful in their site building. I have been using something similar on client site's for years and it really works out well. If you would like to see any new features or find a bug, please submit a ticket on the project's issue page. The module has a 1.0 release as it has been extensively tested and appears very stable. Any new features, should there be any, will go into the dev release.